


Inconsistent, Sporadic, and Completely Unpredictable

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: A Mysterious Alarm, F/M, Flirting, Pre-Minkowski Comanding, Pre-Relationship, what is a timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-15 03:37:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12313008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: They've been on the station for two hundred days already when Minkowski is startled by a new alarm she's never heard before, one that starts up on a normal day, completely out of the blue. As soon as she tries to figure out what it is though, it stops. This might be considered a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that it continues to go off, following no predictable schedule, for no discernible reason, and never lasting long enough for Minkowski to get to the bottom of it. It doesn't help that Hera apparently knows nothing about it. It also doesn't help that Eiffel seem more interesting in gossiping in the comms room than helping her figure it out what the heck is going on with her station.Plus, a polar bear's weight, the percentages of a joke, and the expansion of sweetheart.





	1. In Which Minkowski Is Pranked By A Space Station

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tevvy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tevvy/gifts).



> Friend: hey here's a cute idea for a fic i'd love to read  
> Me, visibly trembling: y e s .
> 
> It's not quite the goofy crackfic you were hoping for, but it's something!

The first time it happened, Minkowski barely noticed. It was approximately two hundred days into the mission and Minkowski was on the bridge, performing routine maintenance to the navigational tracker. She was just noticing that Eiffel _still_ hadn't filled in the damn star charts when her quiet focus was shattered by an alarm going off.

The sound was so unexpected in the mundanity that Minkowski felt her heart skip and panic momentarily flood through her as her mind leapt to every single possible thing that could go wrong when you were lightyears away from Earth and living in the vacuum of space. Just as quickly though she clamped down on the shock and pushed herself towards the console read-out that could hopefully tell her what was happening and what needed to be done right now to stop it. Her one hand was already groping for it as her other reached for her personal comm to radio Hilbert and Eiffel, when, as quickly as it had started, the alarm stopped. It really hadn't lasted for more than a couple seconds, just enough for three, distinct pings to ring out. The returning silence was nearly as startling as the alarm itself had been and Minkowski floated dumbly in it for a moment while she stared at the console screen and its perfectly nominal readings. Minkowski let the system's feed stream past her eyes as she searched for whatever irregularity could have caused the alarm to go off but nothing was showing, and she wasn't even familiar with that particular alarm noise – as far as she knew it hadn’t been activated before this so she really couldn't even begin to guess what it could have been signifying.

“Hera,” she called into the empty space, “did something just happen?”

“Uhhh,” came the AI's synthetic voice, “you may need to be more specific than that, Commander. I have over a hundred different operations happening at any given fraction of a second.”

“Anything that would make an alarm go off? Anything I should be _worried_ about?”

“No, Commander. I don't have any record of any alarms going off, and there's been no operational errors in the past twenty-seven minutes.”

Minkowski blinked. “What happened twenty-seven minutes ago?”

Hera sighed. Minkowski still didn't completely understand how exactly an artificially intelligent mother-program worked – could Hera be annoyed? She sounded annoyed, like Minkowski had just asked her something that was simultaneously very stupid and very hard to explain, but if they were all programmed emotions did they really exist? Minkowski found it easiest not to think too hard about it.

“Doctor Hilbert began to run experimentation cycles and the temperature in the lab needed to be adjusted in order to maintain stasis but a single factor failed to carry over properly – or 'hiccupped' if you like – and caused a slight fluctuation in laboratory temperatures – it wouldn't have even been perceptible to an organ as imprecise as human skin. It was corrected two point seven seconds after it occurred and everything is once again nominal. This is a very complex system, Commander, it's normal for microscopic errors to occur throughout the day, ones which are too small to make a discernible difference to human life on this station and which I immediately correct.”

“Oh. Well... okay then,” said Minkowski. The thought that every day there were errors occurring she wasn't made aware of was unsettling enough that she decided to let it go, for the sake of everyone's sanity. They had survived two hundred odd days so far with Hera taking care of things, even accounting for Cold Shower September, so Minkowski could only assume it was all in capable hands, albeit metaphorically.

-

It continued to happen. It was inconsistent, sporadic, completely unpredictable, and it drove Minkowski up the wall. For one, it wasn't a ship-wide emergency alarm. If it had been, maybe she would have had a better chance of tracking it down. Instead it was classified as a “priority alert” instead of a full-scale warning, which meant it only ever pinged from within the bridge itself or from very specific, designated terminals scattered around the station. The problem was, priority alerts _should_ stick around long enough for it to be promptly dealt with before a real emergency could occur, that was kind of the _point_ of the whole 'priority' thing. This one didn't do that. It didn't help that Hera never seemed to notice it. She insisted that nothing was going wrong according to her internal read-outs, so that meant either this was something that was supposed to happen (and admittedly, after The Empty Man, Minkowski wouldn't put it past Command to install a random, meaningless alarm just to keep her paranoid), or it was coming from a system outside Hera's control (and after finding that eerie old lab, that also seemed possible – except that, firstly, if it was coming from there it shouldn't be an alarm hooked up to the main system, and secondly, after what felt like the fiftieth time of having that alarm ping mockingly at her Minkowski had scoured that lab from top to bottom looking for a cause).

If it wasn't any of that, then it seemed that surely there must be a problem with Hera herself. Minkowski had suggested that possibility to Hera exactly once and then never again. Hera had _not_ appreciated Minkowski asking her if she might be broken. By now Minkowski was also realizing that no matter how Hera's emotions worked, they were definitely real and definitely something to be both respectful and wary of. It didn't do anyone any favours to piss off the person who heated your showers in the morning.

The only other possibility Minkowski could see was that _she_ was the one who was losing it. That possibility was seeming distressingly more likely the longer this continued, since no one else ever seemed to hear it. Of course, Hilbert was generally in his lab and Eiffel was in the comms room, so it wasn't like anyone else was on the bridge to hear it, but still, it was getting ridiculous.

-

It was approaching the five-hundred-fifty mark and Minkowski had been propelling herself down one of the Hephaestus's many corridors towards Hilbert's lab to see if he had any updates on the radiation that should be expected in the upcoming flares the station would be experiencing. She was moving carefully because Doug was coming in the opposite direction, chatting away with Hera and clearly distracted rather than actually doing anything he _should_ be doing. The combination of narrow halls and no gravity meant you needed to move carefully if you didn't feel like a head-on collision with a coworker.

(And honestly Eiffel's hygiene was concern enough that she preferred to avoid that, thank you very much.)

“Look,” Eiffel was saying, “it makes complete sense! You're used to watching an entire space station like, all the time, right? So when we finally repent for our sins and get to leave this purgatory, all we gotta do is get you some sort of kickass robot body and then we should _totally_ try one of those escape room things. If you can keep us from routinely dying in a star's gravity well, you could totally get us out of some stupid puzzle room in record time!”

“I can do what I can because I have sensors in every corner of this station, Officer Eiffel. I doubt that would be the case if I had a... 'robot body'.”

Eiffel scoffed. “Yeah, but you're still, like, the smartest person I've ever met. We'd be a _kickass_ team.”

Any other thought Minkowski might have been having at the time immediately fled her mind because right then that all too familiar, all too infuriating ping went off.

And there just so happened to be a system terminal in this corridor.

Minkowski grabbed the wall so hard the rest of her body kept trying to continue with its previous momentum while she whipped around and grabbed the console, slamming her hand over it to wake it up and _yes_ , she could see a single line of text that indicated an alert was going off, now she just needed to–

Except she had stopped suddenly and Eiffel, distracted as he was, had kept moving down the corridor, and before Minkowski could see more than two words he'd slammed face first against her, ripping Minkowski's grip from the console and sending them both spiraling in a cursing, spluttering heap towards the opposite wall which they promptly bounced off of like a pinball.

In the precious few seconds it took to extract herself from Eiffel, which may or may not have involved an elbow to his stomach, the alert shut down.

“Commander, what the heck,” moaned Eiffel, from where he floated pitifully, holding his gut. “How 'bout flicking on the hazards next time you decide to stop dead in the middle–”

“ _Did you hear it?_ ”

Eiffel stared at her with an expression of mild concern – probably more for himself than her, since she'd grabbed him by his shoulders at this point.

“Uhh, hear what, Commander?” he asked carefully.

“ _Hear wh_ – the alarm! Did you hear the alarm! The one that keeps going off and is _driving me crazy_.”

Eiffel's expression told her that crazy was an apt choice of words at the moment.

“Commander, I'm gonna be honest with you, I have no idea what you're talking about. This ship is constantly beeping or buzzing or something, how can you even tell it's the same–”

“ _I just. know_. It keeps going off and then keeps stopping just when I'm about to figure out what the hell it is.”

“So what you're saying is you're being ding-dong-ditched by the space station?” asked Eiffel. “Um, you know anything about this Hera? Because if you're doing it to prank Minkowski, while I would normally be completely on board with that, I'm losing circulation in my arms...”

Minkowski, only just then realizing how intense her grip on him had gotten, let go a little sheepishly.

Hera, on the other hand, replied with the increased exasperation she was getting any time Minkowski asked her about the alarm. “As I keep telling Commander Minkowski, no, I have no record of _anything_ going wrong.”

Eiffel shrugged, clearly completely unconcerned by the fact that the ship could currently be experiencing critical system failures without any of them knowing it. “You heard the voice in the sky, chief. You must be losing it.” He patted her back consolingly. “It was bound to happen up here sooner or later. Maybe now you'll finally relax a bit.”

Minkowski just groaned to herself. There was absolutely nothing, _nothing_ , relaxing about this.

Something _had_ to be causing this and she _would_ figure it out.


	2. In Which The Virtues Of Chinese Takeout And The Strange Effects of Douglas Eiffel Are Reflected Upon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter got a slight edit because I realized I'd uploaded an outdated draft

“–and don't even get me _started_ on shitty Chinese takeout at two in the morning. Noodles _drowning_ in that weird red sauce... seriously, when you start eating that stuff at around three forty, time itself stops existing and you know that your life is a hot mess but it doesn't matter cause you're cramming your face full of sinful, sinful carbs and sugar. I wish you could taste just so you could have that experience, it's life altering.”

“Uh-huh,” said Hera, dully. She wasn't entirely sure how they had gotten to this particular topic of discussion. It had started with music, the space music, which had gotten Eiffel talking about other music he liked, which went towards clubs which eventually just degenerated to Eiffel recounting the things he missed about Earth. As he spoke, he was staring distantly out the window, as if he could somehow catch sight of a tiny, blue dot somewhere in the blackness.

Hera was glad there was no sign of Earth in her sensory horizon.

“You really miss it,” she said.

“Yeah, but who wouldn't, stuck up here? Nothing to do but listen to static and lectures from our very own space dictator and nearly getting eating by a damn vegetable that decided it was tired of getting prodded by Hilbert,” he grumbled.

“Uh-huh. I guess you can't wait to leave.”

The fact that she would expect anything different from him filled her with a sort of angry humiliation, which mostly just bubbled up through her code as anger.  Of course he wouldn't want to stay here – it was like he said, who would?  There was certainly nothing appealing to make him want to stay somewhere cramped and dim and deadly when he could be on Earth, free to do whatever it was Eiffel normally spent his days doing.

“Hoo boy, yeah, you could say that,” said Eiffel wistfully. There was a long moment of silence, as Eiffel drifted and gazed. Hera felt a million miles away from him, as far away from him as Earth was.

Farther, even. He understood Earth, in his own, limited, human way. He didn't understand her. She knew that every time he called her the auto-pilot, every time he asked if she was there, every time he made another stupid reference to some homicidal pop culture robot that she didn't fully understand.

And so why did she get the flickers of positive feedback in her circuitry when she heard his voice, distorted through the speakers that were her ears, asking if she was there? She was _always_ there, at the beck and call of humans, and yet he still asked. Still cared to ask. Still _wanted_ her there. She didn't know how she felt about that. It had been almost six hundred days now, it had been almost two years, and she still did not know how she felt about Doug Eiffel.

She certainly felt things now, with the thought of Doug so eager to be away. It wasn't anger, exactly. She didn't know what to call it. Anger was easier. It was a steady thing somewhere deep in her personality matrix, a fury that hummed beneath her, ebbing and flowing but steady, like the CO2 feeding in and out of the life support, pattern constant. Other feelings were... harder. Complex, nebulous, and so liable to change. And Doug made them change all the time.

Hilbert and Minkowski, they didn't ask with that sort of tentative hope whether or not she was there. They didn't talk to her about Earth movies or human food or feelings. What was the point, she was a computer, she couldn't _really_ understand them, right? Doug talked to her about all of those things. He listened to her talk back.

She had never had a friend before. She wasn't fully sure what one was. She thought, suspected, hoped that just maybe that was what this was.

Finally, Eiffel broke the silence of the comms room. “Still, no one I'd rather be stuck light-years away from any sort of creature comfort with than you, sweetheart.”

Code was constant, but emotions, those were inconsistent, sporadic, and completely unpredictable; they could change on a dime, and Eiffel, whether he knew it or not, played with Hera's like a yoyo. All it took were those few words, and she felt like a weight had been shed – for a moment, Hera _glowed_. Well, not literally (or at least no more so than she usually did with various lights and sensors and read-outs all over the station) but she had consumed a robust amount of human literature and it seemed an appropriate descriptor. She felt light, bright, too full and yet desperate for more. She heard those words and for a moment nothing else existed but them. She felt _happy,_ happy but so enormously so it was almost incomprehensible.

She knew not to take his words seriously, she _knew_ that, because Doug Eiffel didn't take anything seriously, but she just liked the way they sounded, the way they tripped off his tongue without a thought. It was as if, even if he didn't _mean_ anything by them, it was still a natural thing to say. Being an AI, a robot, a _space station_ , there was a division, you existed in a separate world from humans, operated on a different level, and in the back of your mind you knew that they saw you as pieces, as things that could be taken apart and rearranged or destroyed. Maybe that was all she was. Sometimes that's what it felt like, when she tried to keep all the discordant parts of the ship from falling apart. But when Eiffel said he liked being with her, with _her_ , it all felt so much more... real. Like there was a her, a single her, that someone could _want_ to be with. Not individual parts and programs and systems, just a her.

She liked that feeling, and she was embarrassed by how much she liked that feeling, and she was embarrassed by how much she liked being around Doug Eiffel because he made her feel that way so effortlessly, like it was the natural course of things, like they fit together as two complete people in an effortless way. He could do that, with just his words.

Because somehow Eiffel, who spoke in indecipherable pop culture references she didn't understand all that well, had stretched a word that was meant to fit a human and had managed to wrap it around someone whose brain was the size of a house: _sweetheart_. She liked that. A lot.

So for a moment, just one moment, she let that word echo back and forth through her auditory pathways and appreciated it and _glowed_. It felt good. It felt _warm_. The worst thing though, was knowing that it meant so much more to her than to him. How could she feel so good and so awkward and so embarrassed and so desperate for more and so at ease, all in the same moment?

It was a strange effect that Doug Eiffel had on her.

-

Sometimes that feeling was big and profound, like that time in the comms rooms. Other times it was a small thing, something she barely noticed, something that flashed warm and hot through her system as quickly and naturally as her pumping nitrogen through the station's piping.

“I'm not going to tell you about the book Minkowski brought with her,” said Hera firmly.

“Come _on_! You can't just tell me that she has _one super secret book you're not allowed to talk about_ and then just not tell me!”

“What part of 'I'm not allowed to talk about it' didn't you understand? She _is_ my commanding officer, and unlike you I don't have the option to stage impromptu coups again my commander. The people that programmed me weren't big on that idea.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, no robot overload uprising today. But come on, surely you can just like... tell me the first letter? There's got to be a loophole here.”

“Oh, there are.” Hera had figured out the solution for that one a while back, the book thing was a pretty small-fry puzzle in the terms of an iron-fisted code, but it had kept her amused for a couple days trying to mentally work around the blocks. “But I'm still not going to tell you, because then you're going to tease her and then she's going to murder you. I'm doing this because I care, Doug.”

“Hera, baby, I love you, but you gotta help me out here!”

And there it was. Said so quickly and unsuspectingly, but the words shot through her, made everything else disappear for a microsecond, made the thousands of racing thoughts in her brain quiet down for a moment as she struggled with the warm, stupid happiness that made it feel like her very lines of code were squirming inside her. _I love you_. If she could smile, she was sure she would be, big and bright and ridiculous. It was a good thing she couldn't.

And then the second was over, and though the warm fuzziness lingered, the world returned to normal. In the end, she gave in, and gave him a few hints. He was so delighted, how could she not? Oh, the commander would absolutely kill him later, and possibly her too if she found out where Eiffel had heard it from, but it was worth it for the moment.

She wondered, briefly, if she should mention to Doug the way she felt around him. And then she stopped wondering; after all, it had only been for a moment.

-

And then she died. Hilbert ripped out her brain. Everything was gone. Any chance to talk about any of the things going on in her head was gone. Doug was gone.

-

And then she was back. Everything was weird, the ship was weird, her code was weird, her feelings were _weird_ but she was back. Everything had _also_ been on fire at the time, but it hadn't helped that she didn't feel like she quite fit right in her own body any more. It had been hard enough to think or do anything at the time, so when her sensors slowly and awkwardly came back online and she had _heard Eiffel's voice_ she had nearly... something. Screamed? Short circuited? Something big and dramatic – the feeling, at least, had been big and dramatic. He was alive, she was alive, they were alive. It had felt... important, at the time. But she hadn't managed to do anything because her body fit wrong and there was a lot of screaming errors in her head and _the man who had killed her was right there trying to touch her_ and everything had gotten weird.

And then it had slowly and awkwardly gotten a little better.

Her feelings had stayed weird. But warm. So she supposed that was okay.

There had been points, before, when she had wondered if she would miss Eiffel when he “went away forever”. When he died. Well, she knew the answer to that now. There was a slight relief in that, despite the lengths it had taken to figure it out.

After she had managed to stop the spread of the fire and the ship was approaching stable again, Minkowski had left to take Hilbert away, leaving Eiffel alone in the room. He looked like he was about to fall asleep at any moment, slumped as he was heavily against a wall.

“Missed you,” he told her in a sleepy slur. “Missed you so much.”

Warm. Not burning engines and fried circuitry warm, but warm like home. “Thank you, Officer Eiffel. I missed you too. ...Now, if you wouldn't mind, there's something I really need you to do for me.”

“Anything,” he said sincerely. He should have been going to bed, he looked terrible, but he would do this for her. Her systems flooded with the feeling those words left in her, and for a moment the strange feelings of new neural conductors faded under the intensity of the feeling.

Yes, weird would be alright.

-

Minkowski was making her way back from Hilbert's cell, where she had deposited him bound and gagged at Hera's request, when she heard the ping for the first time in... how long? A week? Two weeks? Longer? During the time they'd been without Hera and it had been all they could do just to keep the ship together; she'd lost track of the weird little alert, one alarm had faded into the next, into the next. God, it was hard to believe that Hera was really back, that she was actually hearing her voice again. She knew Doug had been determined that there had to be some way to bring her back, had been devoted to the idea, but Minkowski had been considerably more skeptical. She had never been more glad to be wrong. Even that stupid priority alert couldn't dampen her mood; with the ship quiet and Hera back online, it felt strangely comforting, even. Like a squeaky floorboard in your house that was always kind of annoying until you left home for a while and realized how much you missed it. It pinged a whole four times but Minkowski didn't have the energy to chase it. She barely had the energy to haul herself back to the bridge rather than fall asleep in the nearest storage compartment.

“I've been able to direct Eiffel to the directories containing Emergency Code Alpha Victor, and he's deleted it,” Hera tells her once she's joined them, and Minkowski feels the final bit of tension left in her seep out. Maybe, just maybe, this nightmare could be over for a few minutes.

Except first there was still work to do. She would take first rotation because Eiffel... well, he was her crew and he looked like death warmed over and she was sending him straight to bed. He'd earned it. And it seemed that Hera had a _lot_ to share about Hilbert, so first and foremost she was going to get a notebook so they could get that sorted as soon as possible. If he had any more secrets hidden, she was going to learn about all of them.

Leaving the room, she didn't even notice the fact that Eiffel wasn't following her out and heading to his bed. She didn't really think anything of it.

-

Hera noticed, and did think something about it. Several things. But what she said was, “Go to bed, Officer Eiffel. You haven't slept in three days.”

Eiffel, perpetually lazy, slacker Eiffel, resisted though. “What? No, no, I... want to hang out with you and... talk... Just for... Just for a little while...” All of this was said from between yawns.

Warm. “All right. Just for a little while. What do you want to talk about?”

They didn't get any farther than that, because Eiffel was already asleep. But he had been willing to push himself until the very last moment, just so that her voice was the last thing he heard before falling asleep. Just because he missed her.

-

The system pinged again. And again, Minkowski ignored it. There was a plant monster in their vents and an indecisive alert notification in their systems and both of those were problems to deal with sooner or later, but for the moment later was perfectly appealing, thank you very much. She went to collect her notebooks, and came back to find Eiffel floating in the middle of the bridge, fast asleep. Whatever compelled him not to go straight to his bunk as soon as she'd given him the go ahead, she couldn't imagine and Hera didn't seem to have any insight to offer. Not that it really mattered, she would pushed him to his sleeping bag when she was done with Hera.


	3. In Which Bad Pick-Up Lines And Unexpected Revelations Are Made

Later quickly became sooner. They still had minor catastrophes to deal with on a pretty regular basis, what with the ship still being in a state of falling miserably to pieces and Hera not being at a hundred percent yet, but there was breathing room again. And that breathing room meant time to notice that god-awful pinging. She swore it had picked up since last time; she had been noticing it at least one a day lately, if not more – it was getting ridiculous.

Eiffel remained uninterested. “Look, I'm just saying if it's been going on for _over a year_ and it hasn't killed us yet, then I'm calling bullshit. Clearly it's not _that_ 'priority'.”

Hera remained unhelpful. “Commander, no offense, but if I couldn't differentiate this tiny error from every other function shooting through my brain every minute _before_ , how do you think I'm going to manage it now that someone's stuck his gross, evil fingers in my brain and moved everything out of order?”

Hilbert at least seemed mildly interested when she finally gave in and went to quiz him about it, but she suspected it was more because he was painstakingly bored and no longer had anything more interesting to occupy himself with. She was now really wishing there was a console in the observatory, then maybe Hilbert could have caught it during his abundance of down time... but of course, one of the reasons the observatory had been chosen as a suitable cell was because it _didn't_ have system access. Still, a woman could dream.

-

It was unusually quiet in the comms room at the moment. Eiffel wasn't recording a log, space was silent, and Hera... well, she was also silent. Eiffel knew she'd been struggling lately, what with the whole unexpected brain surgery thing. She had been a little off, lately (after nearly being asphyxiated in an unintended attempt at double homicide, Eiffel was _very_ aware of this). Not just with all the slip-ups and errors – heck, he was enough of a mess that he could hardly cast stones if Hera wasn't feeling totally on her A game after being, for all intents and purposes, dead up until recently – but she had been... distant, lately. Touchy. Things had gotten a little better after their long talk, but there was still something different about Hera, and Eiffel didn't think it had anything to do with Hilbert's reconstruction.

These errors were really getting to her. Eiffel didn't even think it was just the scare-factor of being responsible for a lot of lives at any given moment. Something about being wrong and making mistakes, it was _really_ getting to her, and Eiffel couldn't figure out what _exactly_ it was – if it was just the Hilbert thing, or just her getting annoyed with them for constantly getting on her case, or if she was cranky from trying to break in a new brain or whatever, and it didn't help that she refused to acknowledge it or talk about it.

Goddamn, he wasn't made for this sort of thing. He just wanted her to stop being upset. He wanted things to go back to normal and stop sucking so much, he wanted things to be like they were before Christmas, before Hilbert had officially flipped his shit and tried to murder them all and Command went full Weyland-Yutani on their asses.

As long as he was dreaming, he also wanted to be back on Earth and have a giant cheeseburger in one hand and the most expensive item on the Starbucks menu in the other.

But... well, Hera was his best friend. He owed her _something_ right? And so Eiffel went with his gut and said the first thing that came to his head.

“Hey, Hera, how much does a polar bear weigh?”

His words hung heavy and awkwardly in the previous silence. For a moment it didn't seem like she was going to respond, and then, “...An adult male polar bear weighs between three hundred fifty and seven hundred kilo–”

“Enough to break the ice!”

“I... what?”

Eiffel grinned up at the ceiling. “How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice! Get it?”

“Is that supposed to be a... joke?” asked Hera skeptically. “I've heard better. Even your usual attempts at humour at least try to be funny.”

“Well, kind of... I mean, not really a joke, technically it's more of like... a pick-up line? It's just a thing you say to, you know, break the ice when you're trying to talk to someone and its awkward. It's not really meant to be funny, it's actually pretty lame...”

“So you said something incredibly dumb to make me talk to you,” said Hera.

“Well, when you put it like that...”

“I suppose it's no different from usual then,” said Hera. She added after a moment, “That _was_ a joke.”

Eiffel snorted. “Fair enough. Here, I've got another one. If I could rearrange the alphabet, baby, I'd put U and I together.” He winked up at the ceiling.

Hera laughed, and Eiffel grinned even wider.

-

In the end, after spending hundreds of days trying to track this stupid ping down, she eventually figured it out entirely by accident. Hera had reported some difficulties getting one of the auxiliary thrusters to initiate – she had described it as “sticky”, and while it still worked they'd unanimously agreed that this was something that would be good to fix as quickly as possible – so Eiffel was up in the bridge watching the displays and pushing buttons when told, and Minkowski was down in the engines doing the heavy lifting. Metaphorically speaking, it was still weightless. But still.

What she didn't love was that she currently had Hilbert with her, but if they were going to be digging into the aux thruster panels it would require at least two sets of competent hands. Between her and Eiffel they had one and a half, if you were being generous, and they still needed someone to man the bridge controls. So with some reluctance, that meant Hilbert was on another little field trip.

“Line ready to disengage,” came Hilbert's muffled voice – muffled because Minkowski had her head and shoulders deep within a thruster's internal circuitry casing.

“Right,” she grunted. She was twisted almost in half, arms wrapped around a injector line that was nearly as thick as her thigh. “Eiffel,” she called through the comms, “when I get to zero, Hilbert's going to disengage the line, and you need to _immediately_ hit that button sequence Hera showed you. If you don't do this, I am going to _literally die_. Got it?”

“Don't sweat it, Commander, I'm on it.”

“Hera...” added Minkowski, a little desperately.

“Don't worry, Commander, I'll make sure he does it.”

“ _Hey_.”

Minkowski ignored Eiffel's affront and started her count down. It went seamlessly. Line disengaged, she was able to yank it out and then Hilbert was reaching into the casing as well, shoving replacements towards her hands; quickly the line was reconnected, Hilbert did a count down for re-engagement, and between Eiffel and Hera the thruster was started back up again and their course was adjusted for the brief period offline.

“Good work everyone,” called Minkowski, still half in the casing as she tidied up the debris left floating inside it.

“Don't thank me, thank our genius navigator for once again keeping us out of the burning death ball,” came Eiffel's cheery voice.

Minkowski rolled her eyes and was about to playfully point out that, technically, _she_ was the navigations officer, when all of a sudden _that wretched ping_. Minkowski managed to slam her head on the casing in her scramble to get out and get to the console she knew was _right there, almost within arms reach_ but, of course, the pinging stopped before she'd moved half a foot.

Hilbert, however, had still been at the console when the ping had gone off. He was now staring at the screen, eyebrows raised.

“That was your mystery alarm?” he asked her.

“ _Yes_! Did you see what–?”

“Better than that, Commander. Thought that might be what you had been speaking about, so I saved the screen data. You... may want to see this.”

And finally Minkowski learnt what the beeping was. A engine coolant alert. An _engine coolant alert_. She stared at the screen with mute horror. They had been having problems with their engine cooling system for, what, two years without knowing it? How? How in the world was that possible?

The answer, of course, was related to the fact that it was only considered a priority alert, not a genuine emergency alarm. Priority alerts for the coolant system were raised with the coolant system either turned off or stopped working optimally and the engine temperature began to rise – it only became a genuine alarm when the temperature rose past a certain point, and from the screenshot Hilbert had taken, it would appear that almost as soon as the temperature had begun to rise, the coolant system had kicked in again and the temperature had lowered once more to acceptable temperatures, hence why the alert had cut off so quickly.

It didn't change the fact that the temperature was apparently _regularly_ spiking and their mother-program had no idea.

“Hera...” Minkowski called.

“Y-yes, Commander?”

Minkowski and Hilbert's shared a look. It had gotten to the point where, honestly, Minkowski rarely even noticed Hera's vocal glitch anymore, it was just a part of outer space life. This was much more pronounced. If Minkowski didn't know better, she would have said it sounded like they'd taken Hera by surprise, but Hera was everywhere, saw everything, heard everything – as Eiffel had figured out during his first year, you couldn't hide from Hera, couldn't sneak up on her, couldn't surprise her.

At least, you shouldn't be able to.

“Hera, you feeling okay?” asked Minkowski as delicately as she could..

“Just fine, Commander. Everything's great. Why do you ask?”

Another look was shared between her and Hilbert – she didn't much like sharing anything with the man, but for just this moment Minkowski was relieved that someone else finally understood.

“Something's up with the engine coolant system. Any ideas?”

“What! No...” A moment's dead air, but Minkowski could hear something electronic whir nearby. “No, I'm not reading any abnormalities, Commander. Everything seems to be just fine...”

“Would it be considered 'abnormality' for it to cease functioning?” asked Hilbert sharply.

“Yes... but it's working _fine_.”

“Well it wasn't a second ago, Hera,” said Minkowski. “It quit. Completely. Not for long but... that's not good. And I think that's the same alert I've been getting for _the past year_ , the one that's not registering to you.”

“That just doesn't make sense, Commander, none of my readings are showing any issues here. I'm sure it's fine. Don't worry about it!”

Minkowski took a deep breath. “Hera. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless something major has changed in the last few days, the big engines on the side of the station are still the things that keep us from dropping into the star, correct?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Then I think I'll worry about it, just a little bit.”

In the end, to Minkowski's dismay, there wasn't much that could be done. Hera still didn't want Hilbert having anything to do with her systems, which Minkowski whole-heartedly understood and supported as she had no interest in a second go-around at Christmas, but neither Minkowski nor Hera could find anything that explained what was happening. In the end Minkowski had Hera route any future engine coolant alerts through her personal comm system so she could have immediate access and hopefully figure out what was going on.

It worked both better and more strangely than Minkowski could have anticipated.

-

Minkowski was in the comms room, trying to help Eiffel and Hera get the receiver in what Eiffel had decided was a better position for space music interception, when the alert went off. It wasn't the first time it had gone off since she had had the alert re-routed, though she hadn't actually accomplished anything with it other than realizing how often it went off when normally she wouldn't be near enough a console to hear it. It was the circumstances of this one that were different – or more accurately, it was Minkowski's perspective of the circumstances that was different.

“I'm picking up some very faint signals, but they're not clean enough for me to get a proper lock on,” Hera was saying.

“Come on, beautiful, you've got this,” Eiffel murmured as he fiddled with the controls in front of him.

One thing Minkowski was learning from agreeing to help Eiffel in here was that he and Hera chattered endlessly. About nothing. Eiffel's mouth just constantly ran, and Hera, apparently, didn't mind. Minkowski would have tried to strangle Eiffel by now if she'd been forced to listen to him constantly day in and day out. But Hera just responded, sounding... amused, actually. Like this was a game they played.

“Calling me beautiful would be erroneous,” Hera commented, “I don't actually have a body like you do. There's nothing to be beautiful.”

“What?” said Eiffel, looking up from what he was doing with mock offense. “I call bullshit. I am literally floating inside your body right now. And let me just be the first to say that corrugated steel has never looked so good. ...Uh, Commander, your thing is kinda going wild there, we aren't going to explode, right?”

Minkowski tapped angrily at the read out on her comms unit. The alert had been there and now it was fading again. It was the same as it ever was, informing her that very briefly the coolant systems had shut down and then rebooted.

“Did you feel anything that time, Hera?” Minkowski demanded. “Please tell me Eiffel wasn't distracting you.”

“Hey, I'm actually _working_ this time,” objected Eiffel.

“I am _not_ distracted. By Eiffel? Ha! Ha ha. How would _that_ distract me! I'm not distracted!” snapped Hera.

“Jeez, thanks,” said Eiffel. “Is this that mysterious ticking noise of yours, Commander?”

Minkowski sighed. “Yes. For some reason the engine coolant system keeps shutting down randomly. The alarm's there to say engine temperatures are rising above nominal, but before I can do anything about it or figure out what's happening the coolant comes back online and the alert ends.”

Eiffel's eyebrows were raised. He finally looked like he understood the severity of the situation, but then his concern smoothed over and he cast the ceiling an affectionately sarcastic look. “Really? Aren't you a little young to be getting hot flashes, Hera?“

“Shut up,“ Hera muttered.

“I'm just saying! You're, what, like three? You're a baby!”

“Officer Eiffel, would you like me to forget something even more important than a couple seconds of coolant? Like, say, the life support?”

“Yeesh! Touchy!” He leaned closer to Minkowski and said in a stage whisper, “Never talk to a lady about her age.”  
Minkowski shoved his face away. “Can you _please_ take this seriously? An engineering system does _not_ get hot flashes and this is _important_ , Eiffel, I don't have time for jokes.”

Eiffel huffed something about killjoys and grouches as he went back to his console, but Minkowski couldn't help but notice the tension that seemed to hang in the room after that, not just from Eiffel but from Hera. She couldn't be that upset about Eiffel's age comment, could she? Or was it something else that was upsetting her?

-

“A computer... can't get hot flashes, right?”

Hilbert turned from where he was floating by the wide observation windows to stare at her with mute disbelief. As if he thought Eiffel had finally started to rub off on her. “ _What_.”

“I don't mean literal hot flashes,” she amended, “but I've been thinking, and... and what if it wasn't _exactly_ an error that was causing the alerts to go off and that's why we can't get to the bottom of it? Like what if something in Hera's code is actually triggering this, so it reads as an appropriate action, and doesn't register as an error to her. Would that be... possible?”

Hilbert's skeptical expression slowly changed to a thoughtful one. He seemed to be genuinely considering this, which was a bit of a relief because Minkowski had felt absolutely crazy for even thinking it.

“So, you're thinking perhaps mother-program's personality matrix is interfering with base functionality?” said Hilbert.

“I... suppose? Could Hera's emotions be affecting the engines?” For some reason, Minkowski couldn't quite let go of Eiffel's comment about hot flashes. It was such a ridiculously human analogy but... something about that entire exchange in the comms room had been strange. The way Eiffel had acted, the way _Hera_ had acted, the way both of them had acted together. She couldn't shake the feeling of a sort of invisible tension, of something complex playing out just below the surface, even before the alert had gone off, but she also couldn't possibly guess what it was supposed to mean. She'd been driving herself up the wall over the past few days trying to riddle it out, but she was at her wit's ends and had no one else to ask. Hera had proven to be increasingly touchy when Minkowski asked about it – or when she asked about Eiffel, oddly enough, the last time she'd asked Hera where Eiffel was she'd snapped at her, informing Minkowski that she was _not_ Eiffel's keeper and why should she care where he was anyway? Eiffel was his usual clueless self, so that was no help. That left, to her dismay, one person who might be able to give her answers.

“Should not be the case,” said Hilbert. “'Personality' may affect judgments made by program, but should not directly affect separate systems without mother-program's say-so. Would be a serious oversight on Goddard's part, if AI could depressurize living quarters just because it's feel a bit under weather.”

“That's true. So it's impossible then?”

Hilbert hesitated. “Not, exactly. Unlikely, but not... impossible. Very rarely are things entirely impossible,” he conceded.

Especially up here, though Minkowski wearily.

“Mother-program and auto-pilot interplay... very complex, very delicate balance. Auto-pilot is essentially directed by mother-program so I suppose there is... possibility that emotional response may be misread as a command function. But if this is the case, in order to resolve the issue we will need to figure out what exactly is triggering command code function. With all the potential variables, especially after... recent incidences...”

“You mean when you tore Hera's brain out and tried to glue it back together again like a five year old who broke his mother's pottery?” offered Minkowski.

“Yes, that,” said Hilbert dryly. “All things taken into account, the possible variables are nearly incalculable, could take some time to–”

The comms crackled to life at that point, with Eiffel's voice piping through them. “Minkowski, you there? I need you to settle a debate for me.”

“It's not a debate, you are _factually_ wrong–” said Hera over the speakers.

“Eiffel, I'm a little busy...”

“It'll just take a minute, Commander. Look, we've been debating the merits of pick-up lines – hear me out, Commander! – and I'm trying to convince Hera that this one is _gold_...”

“Eiffel,” said Minkowski wearily.

“Look, I said 'hey baby are those space pants you're wearing'...”

Hera cut in again, “Officer Eiffel I am not capable of wearing pants. Out of _all_ the lines you've suggested, this one is so entirely pointless!”

“Yes, Hera, I got that, but you've got to work with me a little here! Look, anyone who actually uses pick-up lines and thinks they'll work is already suspending a lot of disbelief so just pretend for a moment...”

“Wouldn't it just make more sense to say them to Minkowski at least? She actually wears pants!”

“ _Say them to Minkowski?_ Hera, are you nuts? Besides for the fact that she would _literally kill me_ it would make even less sense to say it to her!” There was a frustration in Eiffel's tone, like he was struggling to explain something that he himself wasn't fully understanding. “You're the only person it'd make any sense to say them to!”

“O-oh.” Hera's voice glitched over the soft word.

And then Minkowski's alert pinged. Because of course it did. Her gaze immediately locked with Hilbert's and at first he just looked mildly annoyed by Eiffel and Hera's interruption and confused about the disparaging looking Minkowski was sending him. And then he realized. It was a fascinating thing to watch – Hilbert was, by anyone's definition, a genius, and yet watching the slow realization of what was happening spread across his face was an experience unlike any other. Oh yes, emotions were tricky little things, weren't they?

“No,” was all he said.

Minkowski really wished she was wrong. But she also really, really knew she wasn't.

Goddamn. Why didn't it surprise her that Eiffel was partially at fault for this?

 


	4. In Which There Is An Intervention

“Hey, Eiffel... we need to talk.”

Eiffel looked up from where his station, expression changing from one of mild interest to naked concern. Probably because it wasn't just her, but Hilbert drifting in behind her. He was still handcuffed because she's not an idiot, but she also was _not_ doing this alone; at the moment Hilbert looked murderous, though she suspected that was more because he was feeling just as incredibly uncomfortable about this upcoming conversation as she was. Hilbert was not what you would call a “touchy-feely” person.

“Is this an... intervention?” Eiffel asked. “Because Commander, if you're here for my cigarettes I've only got three left and I will fight you and Doctor Creepy for them if I have to, you can't take that away from me too.”

“Something like intervention, yes,” said Hilbert darkly. Eiffel looked even more concerned.

“Look, Eiffel, I just want to make it clear that I don't want to be having this conversation either...“

“ _What conversation?_ ”

Hilbert, evidently fed up with Minkowski's dithering, growled, “ _Stop flirting with mother-program!_ ”

The silence was deafening. Eiffel was staring at them with a sort of wide-eyed horror, Hera's voice was conspicuously absent, and Minkowski was tempted to just drop her head into her hands and wait this out – that was _not_ how she had intended to broach this topic. She should have left Hilbert in his damn cell.

“Eiffel...” she started, but that seemed to jerk Eiffel back to his senses because he immediately began talking.

“Ha ha, Commander, come on!” he said, desperation a sharp edge in his voice. “You think I'm _flirting_? I think the stress is getting to you 'cause that's _nuts_! I'm not– why would I– We're just talking! Can't a guy and an omnipresent voice in the sky be friends these days?” His denial might have been more convincing had it not been for the fact that he was flushed from ears to neck. At least _his_ blushes were only overheating his own face though, rather than a nuclear engine. “Flirting, ha! Right, Hera? Ridiculous, right?”

“Completely,” said Hera, with vehemence.

Minkowski groaned to herself but persevered. She was the commanding officer after all, it was her job to look after the station. Even though she was damn sure no scenario like this was covered at any point during officer training. “Look, Eiffel, it's just... you remember those engine coolant alerts? We think we've finally figured out the cause...”

“So why are we talking about my flirting – _which I am definitely not doing_ – when we could be talking about _that_?” asked Eiffel. “Come on! If you know what's causing it then let's get on it! Go fix it! Tally ho, and all that! What are we waiting for, gossiping about me? What are we, teenagers?”

“As far as we can tell,” Minkowski pressed, “you are, for all intents and purposes... making Hera _blush_.”

Eiffel stared. And stared. And kept staring until Minkowski was beginning to feel _really_ uncomfortable. “Oh my god,” he said distantly.

Hera still hadn't said anything besides her initial, one word interjection.

“Um, Hera...?” called Minkowski tentatively.

“Don't... talk right now Commander. I'm seriously considering launching all of us into the star right now.”

“Okay! No!” said Minkowski desperately. “No, I think we all need to just take a moment and calm down a little. And.. and just _talk_. About our feelings.”

“Oh my god,” repeated Eiffel, this time with more voice-cracking horror. “Hera, I agree, that star is sounding like a good option at the moment.”

Hera cut back in. “Commander Minkowski, I think there's some sort misunderstanding. I... Officer Eiffel most certainly is not flirting with me, and I am definitely not– not _blushing_ , and I know you want to solve this problem but this is wild conjecture and really I–”

“Look, call it what you like, but every time _he_ say something... flirty, you 'blush'. With _the entire engine_. Which is understandably concerning to me.” Minkowski took a deep breath. “If you have a better explanation I would love to hear it, but Hilbert agrees that this probably has something to do with your personality matrix, not the systems themselves, and I've been thinking back on the other incidences I've seen... I hadn't really given them much thought at the time, I thought it was just Eiffel being Eiffel but this... actually makes more sense than it should.”  
  
“I'm not-” insisted Hera, “it isn't- Correlation does not equal causation, commander. There must be something wrong with my code, there...”  
  
“You said so yourself that it isn't a software _or_ hardware issue, Hera.“  
  
“ _Then I missed something!_ It's a _big_ ship, Commander, I _can_ make mistakes! And I _know_ Doug's not being serious so there's no reason t-t-to blush! It's just j-joke.”

  
Eiffel murmured something. Minkowski didn't catch it but Hilbert evidently did because he stared at Eiffel with a sort of disbelief and disgust. “No,” was all the doctor said, curt and final. “Do not even consider.”

“What?” asked Minkowski, already resigned to whatever it was Eiffel was about to say next.

“What?” demanded Hera.

“Nothing! Nothing, it's nothing,” said Eiffel frantically. “Can we please all just... stop, and like, never speak of any of this ever again?”

“Spit it out, Eiffel,” said Minkowski. “We might as well just have it all out now.”

Eiffel quailed under the laser-sharp focus that the rest of the crew was directing to him, before he finally slumped and gave up. “I'd said... it might not... _one hundred percent_ , be a joke, exactly.”

There was silence as the other three took a moment to process this. Hilbert looked like he was seriously considering murdering Eiffel, Decima be damned, and Minkowski didn't even know where to begin with all this. This went slightly beyond fraternization in the ranks, at least as it was outlined in the Commanding Officer's Debrief that she had studied before coming up.

“What does that even _mean_?” Hera cried. “Not 'one hundred percent', what does that even _mean_ , Eiffel? Does that mean ten percent or ninety? What does it _mean_?”

Eiffel stumbled and groped clumsily for the right words, hands flailing as if he could some how get a hold of this situation and make it stop long enough for him to get away. In the end, his hands ended up tugging at his own hair as he admitted, “It _means_ if you want it to be a joke then it's... then it's just a joke. But if you, you know, _didn't_ want it to be a joke then, maybe, just a little, it wouldn't be a joke. If you didn't want it to be.”

“Oh,” was all Hera said in response. The silence was profound once more after that, but Minkowksi was becoming uncomfortably self-conscious of the fact that technically they were all floating in the middle of Hera's entire body as the quiet hum of the station filled the silence.

“Okay!” she said just as her spine was beginning to crawl, “well, good talk. We are... just going to leave you two alone to talk about this and we'll just... go.”

She shoved at Hilbert's back, though he tried to resist. “Commander, please, this a serious matter and it _needs_ to be resolved, the engines–”

“Are just fine for right now! I can't believe I'm saying it but Eiffel's right, we haven't fallen out of the sky yet so we'll just... come back to this. Later.” She just kept shoving Hilbert and herself towards the door. “In any case, I'm sure that Hera and... _Eiffel_ will be able to keep things under control for the time being.”

Hilbert made one last token attempt at protest, foot catching on against a handhold on the wall, but Minkowski gave him a final, hard shove and he floated out, followed quickly by Minkowski who shot Eiffel a final, parting look before shutting the comms room door.

Eiffel stared at the shut door in silent terror.

“Officer Eiffel?” came Hera's voice.

“Is the star still an option?” he asked weakly.

“Not right now, Officer Eiffel. ...Doug? Look, you said it yourself, I'm _three_. Can you please just... explain whatever's going on inside your head because I'm really tired of guessing. And I'm not very good at it.”

“Nope, the inside of my head is an enigma,” Eiffel agreed with forced levity. He took a deep breath and let it out. He supposed there was no escaping this. This was the only “feelings talk” he'd ever been a part of that he couldn't run away from specifically because his commanding officer would know and she had the ability to force march him out an airlock if he fucked things up. “Sooo, on a scale of one to ten, how _do_ you feel about, y'know, flirting. And stuff. With a meatsack human?”

“I... think I could be convinced.”

-

Warm. But a different type of warmth. The other warmth was a secret sort of warmth. Embarrassment, hope, elation – coveted, stolen moments that she took for herself. They made her mind shut down and filled her with a feeling she couldn't describe – and, evidently, it made one of her engine's coolant systems routinely shut down.

This was a shared warmth. Like body heat mixed in a single room, something visible and open and bubbling up unashamed. Fortunately, it was a sort of warmth that a completely different set of neural pathways created and one that didn't seem to trigger any potentially explosive elements in their nuclear engines. Not to say she never... “blushed”, any more, because Eiffel still had a remarkably frustrating and charming way of making her feel all sorts of things, all the time, all over the place, but mostly it was something else entirely.  And Eiffel seemed just a little bit smug that he was capable of making someone who was made entirely out of metal blush.

It was weird.

But everything orbiting Wolf 359 was a little weird, and this, this was a _good_ weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tevvy was the one who thought up the idea of Eiffel being commanded not to flirt with Hera because it made her "blush" by overheating the engines, and I had the compulsive need to build a story around that idea, so here we are!


End file.
